


it’s the end of the world as we know it (and i feel fine)

by chaoticgaysex



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: As A Treat!, BAMF Number Five | The Boy, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Guilt, Human Experimentation, Manipulation, Past Character Death, Season 3 Speculation, Temporary Character Death, all the hargreeves are here & have roles but this story isn’t About Them so i didn’t tag them, ben is here too but he’s sparrow Ben, five causes the apocalypse!, five is. So. So. So op, i think five deserves a mental break down, its so fucked up, no beta we die like ben, pls pls pls let five have his fucked up dna alteration like the comics in s3, time Travel is such an op power and i wanna explore that a little
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-12
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-17 03:35:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29960349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaoticgaysex/pseuds/chaoticgaysex
Summary: Carmichael is known for lying. It’s part of his nature, it’s as easy as breathing for him. But Five ran the calculations himself. He’s not bluffing.In every timeline, there’s one variable that continuously causes the apocalypse:Him.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 22





	it’s the end of the world as we know it (and i feel fine)

**Author's Note:**

> okay so  
> 1) this is written as if it’s a part of the third season, so there’s things they reference that “haven’t happened”  
> 2) aJ and the handler are alive (well, until aj killed the handler) because while the commission exists outside of time, the two were killed in the timeline (1960 & 1980s) so when the butterfly effect took place, they lived  
> 3) the Commission exists outside of time, so they still have information about the timeline the umbrellas are/were from
> 
> time travel is confusing

His eyes snap open.

“Ah, you’re finally awake.”

What a cliche opening. 

Five doesn’t immediately begin to struggle; instead, he glances around him, trying to get his vision to settle so he can see exactly where he is and what’s going on around him. It takes a few seconds before things begin to clear and the blurs begin to fade.

AJ Carmicheal sits adjacent to him, his legs crossed, his eyes glancing at a watch on his wrist. Five attempts to move his hands, but finds them restrained. Something akin to panic slithers down his spine, and he has to work to keep a straight face while Carmicheal resolutely continues to peer at his watch. He’s reminded of a white laboratory room, temps agents wearing white lab coats, soulless eyes leering down at him as scalpels made therapeutic wounds in his chest, and the all accompanying pain that occurs when someone messes with your DNA and rearranges your guts for fun.

“Where am I?” He asks after a few moments, taking a few deep breaths to calm his nerves. He’s not in that laboratory, he’s not being used as a lab rat again, he’s just restrained against a shitty wooden chair, his ankles and wrists tied with a few trucker’s hitch knots. Really, the amount of ropes around him is honestly flattering. Though, considering he assassinated the entire board of directors in the last timeline, it might not be unwarranted.

“If you’re worried about getting your DNA altered again, then I can at least soothe your nerves over that.” He glances away from his watch and adjusts his legs, now crossing at the ankles. He appears almost amused. “You are in our laboratory, though, just a different wing.”

Something cold pits in his stomach. His memories of what happened before waking up here are a bit faint, and he feels like his head has been stuffed full of cotton. He can move his limbs, so he hasn’t been paralyzed like he was for the surgery, but his reflexes are completely off and his fingers won’t properly listen to him. He supposes he can’t untie the knots anytime soon. Once AJ leaves, he’ll scavenge around for knives if he can’t get the one out of his back pocket free. It’s not the first time he’s been tied up like this, and it isn’t the first time he’s managed to escape from it.

“What am I doing here, then?” He tries to add a bit of a bite to his words, but he just sounds tired. 

“I just want to talk to you,” he muses, leaning on his right armrest, watching him curiously. “We have quite a bit to catch up on, since our corrections agency made a literal game-changing discovery.”

“So you decided to drug me and bring me to a creepy laboratory for a discussion we could do over coffee?” 

“While I would love to be inclined to believe we could have a civil discussion, I’ve seen the other timeline, and I know what you’re capable of.”

“Oh, I don’t think you do-”

“I know you’re responsible for the slaughter of the board of directors in the other timeline-”

“At the Handler’s request, need I remind you-”

“And how you murdered me in cold blood-”

“Again, it was the Handler who swallowed you like sushi-”

“And forgive me for assuming a non-violent discussion was going to be out of the question given the DNA alterations.” He gives him a flat look. “Tell me, honestly, what you would do if I released you from your bindings and attempted a conversation with you?”

Five will admit he has a personal bias against AJ, giving the fact that he was the one who authorized the DNA alteration, and that he was present at the experiment, watching with a cigar in one hand with empty eyes as Five’s intestines were ripped out of him and his DNA was altered into something unrecognizable. While he doesn’t enjoy killing, he must say, his personal vendetta against the board of directors was soothed when he took the Handler’s deal.

AJ Carmicheal is a shrewd businessman who only cares about increasing profit margins and exploiting his workers. He will double-cross Five just as he had done before, just as all people in power at this institute had done before. Every single worm squirming in this shithole of a corporation was untrustworthy, as even Herb and Dot had proved to be, and Five knows that he can not trust a word AJ says.

He wishes every day since he slaughtered those assholes that he had swallowed AJ instead.

He hums, then shrugs. “I think we both know.”

“So you understand why you’re in this predicament.”

“I suppose I understand the ropes- a bit excessive, if I might add, given that I’ve been clearly drugged- but I do not understand what I am here for. What do you want from me?”

“I told you, I have a discovery to share with you.” 

Every single person here at the Commission loved to play games, loved to monologue like cheesy action game villains. Their tendency to beat around the bush always tested Five’s nerves even in his better moods; right now, Five’s blood was already rushing, and he could feel the urge to start slicing and dicing. He’s usually able to control these urges, but there’s always been something about AJ’s beady little eyes that gets his adrenaline rushing.

“Are you going to draw this out or are you just going to tell me?” He already knows the answer. “If it’s the former, I’d like to remind you that I have much, much better places to be and things to be doing. I’m on a tight schedule.”

“Like stopping the apocalypse?” There’s an amused expression on his face that Five wants to wipe off.

“Saving my family.” He sucks in a deep breath. “They’re still stuck in Hotel Oblivion. I have to get them out. So if you wouldn’t mind getting on with this…”

“I think you’ll find that after this discussion, you won’t be too interested in saving the world.”

Five’s eyes narrow. 

“You spent forty-five years stuck in the apocalypse because of a mistake you made at thirteen. Have you ever considered what started the apocalypse?”

“What the fuck do you think I’ve been doing these past three fucking weeks?” Five rolls his eyes. “What do you think I’ve been doing for the past forty-five years? Having a vacation?”

“Have you actually considered attempting to fix the source of the apocalypse?”

“Yes.” Five’s voice is strained. He doesn’t fucking understand what he means. “Yes, since we learned that Vanya was the… the bomb, we’ve been trying to do better. We’re trying to fix our mistakes.”

“You’re not understanding,” he states with a tsk, appearing disappointed. Five had never much cared about disappointing him before, but this situation is so fucking frustrating. He has the audacity to appear amused at his lack of understanding, too, which ignited the fire already roaring inside him. “Being the smartest of the Hargreeves bunch can only get you so far considering their combined lack of intelligence, hm?”

“Act like a big boy and say what you mean,” Five ordered, snarling at him.

“Fine, fine. Let’s do this simply.” He shrugs. “Five, who caused the apocalypse the first time?”

It pains him to say this, because it’s not really her fault, but he thinks this is what he’s getting at… “Vanya.”

He tsks again. “Who caused the second apocalypse?”

“... Vanya.”

“Incorrect. I understand why you would assume so, considering she’s the bomb, but that begs the question of who ignited that bomb?”

“Reginald Hargreeves,” he states, plainly.

“Perhaps in the first apocalypse, I could understand that answer. But the second apocalypse had little to do with his meddling. So I will ask you again, Five. Who caused the apocalypse?”

Five is seething. If it wasn’t Vanya, and it wasn’t Reginald, according to AJ, then Five had no fucking clue, and that pissed him off. He hates not understanding, least of all not understanding things about his family, and it’s even worse that this bastard appears to be holding a sort of trump card.

The drugs pumping through his system are making it difficult to think clearly over this. He’s running around in circles in his own head, trying to understand what AJ was talking about.

“I don’t know.” He loathes to admit it to him.

“The answer is simple: you.”

Five narrows his eyes. “Explain.”

“You’re so slow,” he bemoans, tossing his hands dramatically, before seemingly pondering, “but I suppose no one exactly expects themself to be the one who causes the end of all life on earth. I suppose I can’t blame you- the solution seemed simple, didn’t it? To place the blame all on Vanya, who did in fact blow up the moon? Or Reginald, who set all these events in motion?”

“Explain,” Five repeats, his patience wearing thin. His fingers twitch- oh, the urge to draw blood is getting very, very strong right now.

“Vanya may have been the grenade, but you were the one who pulled the pin.”

Five swallows as AJ moves to stand. There’s not a scalpel in his hand like the last time he was left restrained in a room with him, but that doesn’t mean he won’t try anything. 

He walks over towards Five, hands clasped behind his back. He leans over, the fish nearly ramming into the glass but managing to stop himself. He peers down at him with an unreadable expression.

“You ran away, seventeen years ago, and appeared in the aftermath of the apocalypse.” He hums. “Have you ever considered the effects that made in the time you abandoned? How the world was affected in 2002 and onward when prodigious Five Hargreeves disappeared off the face of the earth? For someone so self absorbent, you don’t seem to realize just how wide of an impact you make.”

He pauses, letting Five fester over his words, while he reaches into his front pocket and pulls out a cigarette. He reaches into a different pocket and pulls out a lighter. Lighting up the cigarette, he tilts the carton towards Five. Smoke is blown into his face, and for a moment Five feels himself back in the apocalypse, surrounded by fire and ash and decayed bodies that char under the blazes of hellfire from a shattered moon.

He slips his cigarettes back into his pocket. 

“If you had stayed, none of this would have happened. You’re the catalyst, Five. Your disappearance is the event that set all the dominos to fall.”

Five flounders. “Because I wasn’t there originally to help them fight Vanya?”

“Think bigger. We’ve done the calculations on that original timeline. The issues that you face- Vanya’s instability, Ben’s tragic death, Luther’s obedience to your father, Klaus’s everything, the overall horrific dysfunction of your family… well, if you had stuck around, none of that would have happened.”

He blows into the cigarette again. “You’re a softy, Five. Your biggest weakness was your family, even when you were younger. You would have done everything in your power to keep your family safe, but just as equally important, happy. I'm sure you have plenty of memories helping your family in times of need as a child.”

Five doesn’t say a word, but he does begrudgingly think back to his childhood. He… Well, Five certainly isn’t the kindest person alive today, and even when he was younger, his empathy levels weren’t exactly to die for. But he wasn’t a complete piece of shit.

Memories of sitting with Klaus in that mausoleum, hours on end, trying to distract him from the ghosts. Sitting by Allison, letting her do his makeup or listen to her cry after a particularly bad mission or special training. Taking Ben on trips to Griddy’s for donuts after he had killed a few people on their last mission. Helping Luther with his math homework so Reginald would be proud of him. Talking to Vanya and listening to her play so she felt heard. Calming Diego down when Luther and he would fight.

It was the little things, Five tried to do. He was competitive and ruthless during training, eager to learn and eager to prove himself. But Five did care about his family, even if he could never bring himself to say those three words. He supposed his love language had always been acts of service.

AJ watches him think before waving his cigarette. “You were the glue to that household, Five. When you left, it caused everything to collapse. If you had been there, countless things would have changed. You would have saved Ben. You would have noticed Vanya’s medication was strange and would have helped her found her powers. You would have been there to have helped Klaus and subsequently soften his addiction before getting him help. You would have shown Luther that your father was not the best role model. A functional family would have taught Allison to be more careful with her powers. Do you understand, Five?”

He does.

If Five had stayed, he could have taught Luther to rebel against his father. Luther had always been loyal to his father, but teenagehood is the years where a person is most susceptible to changing their frame of mind. Five could have pulled him away from that path.

He could have offered support to Allison and Diego; he could have shown them interest in their endeavours, could have helped Diego channel his need to help people in a more positive endeavour. He could have shown Allison that she didn’t need to manipulate people into loving her; that he loved her unconditionally, to the end of times and then some, and that he would fight tooth and nail for her no matter what she does.

He could have been there for Klaus. He couldn't have stopped that addiction, it was festering long before Five left, but Five knows his disappearance was the catalyst for Klaus stepping into harder drugs. He could have been there for him instead of leaving him to rot in that mausoleum.

He could have been there for Ben. That’s all he needed to do; he just needed to be there. Ben was bitter even in his childhood, but all Five had to do was save him; from himself, from the mission, from his father. Five could have saved him, could have changed the tide if he had just been there.

Five had already had his suspicions that Vanya’s lack of powers was bizarre and needed to be looked into. If he wasn’t consumed with time travel, he would have looked into it further. He knows that he was Vanya’s only real friend- if he hadn’t disappeared, Vanya wouldn’t have felt completely abandoned.

He knows, he knows, he’s always known since reading Vanya’s autobiography that his disappearance was the root of all their problems. If he had just been there for his siblings, he could have fixed everything. Because that had always been Five’s job, even when he was young- he just had to fix everything.

He could have been there for his siblings, just as he had been at thirteen. Because yes, undeniably, he was not a good person, he was not kind or compassionate, he was arrogant and stubborn and way too mean, but under everything, Five _loved_ his siblings, even when he was younger. 

It was never a fantasy that Five was chasing. The idea of his loving siblings was real, the idea of protecting them and giving them everything he had wasn’t just forged from the fires of hell. Five didn’t need the apocalypse to forge his undying love for his siblings- he’d always felt that way.

He was stubborn and mean but he loved them so fucking dearly. He would have done anything to give them a happy life, to give them something better than the life their father gave them. Time travel was a result of his arrogance, yes, but it was also an endeavour he studied so he and his siblings could escape their fucked up lives. He only ever wanted what was best for his siblings, and fuck. He never was able to give it to them.

Diego developed his god awful hero complex. Luther became too attached to their dad. Allison never figured out when to quit until it was too late. Klaus spiraled. Ben died. Vanya was abandoned.

All these things happened because Five left them to fend for themselves after taking care of them for years. Because Five allowed himself to be arrogant, to be selfish, and that moment fucked over the entire human race. Worst of all, it fucked over all his siblings.

(The bodies. The bodies. The bodies. 

He can never forget them. He can never forget them.

Charred, already filled with maggots. Festering, spoiled, like old meat gone bad. Laying in the ruins of the academy, failure heavy in their blank faces-

Nukes, falling from the sky. Their expressions one of hard determination in the face of a nuclear massacre. The fires of nuclear war, going out in yet another blaze of glory, this time as a team, this time all together except for him-

The barn. Blood, all over the hay, bodies dropping with heavy thunks. The sounds of their last breath whistling from their lips, empty eyes gazing up, dead far too young, when they were so, so close-

He always survives.)

No one is insignificant.

Five knows this, knows this as a rule of time, one of the very few rules. Time is a crocheted blanket, all-encompassing, ever-growing and expanding. If one stitch was to come undone, the entire row could shift, and potentially, the entire blanket could unravel. 

Everyone’s life is important because everyone makes an impact.

Five never quite took into account how much of an impact he would make.

“Do you understand how you caused the second apocalypse, too?”

He does.

This answer is a lot more simple, something he had already considered. The apocalypse was never supposed to happen in 1963. He brought it there because he fucked up the time jump. His siblings are still emotional wrecks since he left them all alone, to defend for themselves without him, and are still haunted by their trauma. They’ve healed quite a bit, Five’s noticed, but they still had a lot of growth to do.

They were anomalies within the timeline, and the timeline tried to correct itself. The siblings did what they knew best- make a mess of things- and the apocalypse arised from the universe trying to purge them and from them just generally being assholes.

Five brought them there, even if it was by accident. His siblings rightfully blame him for that one, for that flub, but he’d still rather them be scattered across three years than be incinerated by Vanya’s wrath.

“There’s a reason why you’re always the last one living,” Carmicheal continues, calmly. “There’s a reason you keep surviving when everyone else doesn’t. You’re tenacious and quite like a cockroach, but it’s more than that. It’s because you’re the time bomb, Five. You’re the catalyst, you’re the one who is going to cause the very apocalypse you were trapped in. No matter how many times you try to stop it, no matter how many times you manage to seemingly escape its clutches, the end of times will rain because of your actions.”

He flicks the cigarette, ashes falling on Five’s thigh. Carmichael leans down to face Five, so they’re completely eye level. The stench clogs his sense of smell, and Five feels a bit dazed.

“The Commission has come to realize what exactly you are, Five. You are no longer a target of the Commission, because no matter what you do, you’ll eventually lead us to the very results we desire. The apocalypse.”

He leans away, placing the burning cigarette on Five’s arm. It snuffs out almost immediately, the dying embers aren’t a threat, but Five still winces at the sight of fire being so close to him.

“The equation changes and shifts. But the variable stays the same.” AJ crosses his arms. “It’s you, it’s always been you, and it will always be you.”

Five snarls. “I’m not going to cause the apocalypse. Now that I know what the issue is, I know how to avoid it.”

AJ waves his words away. “Do you believe in fate, Mr. Five?”

“If I did, I would have died in that wasteland before I hit twenty five.”

There’s an amused look in AJ’s eyes. “Destiny is real, Mr. Five. I’ll save you your time and effort. You’ll figure it out eventually, when you run your little calculations over what to do now that you know you’re the cause. But I’ll go right on and tell you.”

He glances at his watch. “You see, it doesn’t matter what you do. In those two timelines you were in, did you actively cause the apocalypse? Did you physically blow up the moon or the FBI building? No. But your actions lead to them happening, your inaction and your active attempts to avoid it. It doesn’t matter what you do, Five, even if you manage to stop it. Because taking yourself out of the equation still results in the same answer.”

Five frowns. He’s beginning to understand exactly what Carmicheal means, and he hates every word he’s saying.

“For example,” Carmicheal begins. “If you were to kill yourself- which, I would not be opposed to- you still wouldn’t avoid the apocalypse. Your very being can cause the apocalypse, be it a lack of it or an inclusion. If you kill yourself, your family will become taut with grief until one of them- likely Vanya- snaps and destroys the world. They just got you back, and then they’ll watch you die in vain. You see?”

Carmicheal shrugs. “No matter what you do, the world will end. It’s destiny, it’s fixed. Every timeline you travel to, everywhere you go, the fires of an apocalypse follows you. You can not stop the inevitable, you can only slow it. But it will happen, and it will happen because of you.”

Five’s fingers are twitching. No. Carmichael is lying, Carmichael is lying because he’s a two faced bastard who promised him so many things before ( _“It won’t be painful, you won’t feel a thing-”; “We care about your well being.”; “It’s only five years.”_ ) and he has never, never, never kept his fucking word ( _Five screamed until his lungs gave out, as his guts were ripped out; Carmichael pushes a scalpel into his chest; Time in the Commission is slowed to a near halt, and Five struggles to see any wrinkles developing on his face_ ).

Carmicheal lies, Dot Lies, the Handler lies, Herb lies, Lila lies- all these people ever do is lie, lie, lie, because the truth would give Five the ability to turn on them. All they ever fucking do is hold him back, hold him back from his family, from the life he fucking deserved before they turned him into a glorified rifle, before they ripped out his humanity with a scalpel for fun.

Five frantically begins to perform calculations. A migraine is forming, his rage is building, his blood pressure rising, his vision swimming, and Five is finding it difficult to focus. He calculates and calculates, carries the decimal and accounts for the nonlinerarity of time and calculates and calculates because it can’t be fucking true, becuase all they ever do is lie, it’s the one, universal constant he’s faced in his life other than suffering.

All the calculations lead to the same answer. Five does them, over and over, over and over, because his head is swimming and his concentration has been shot so he must have made a mistake, he must have made a mistake- please, for the love of fucking God, let him have made a mistake-

“You understand now, don’t you?” Carmichael blathers, but Five doesn’t listen to him, doesn’t care about anything he has to say.

No, no, no. 

“We didn’t realise it, at first. No one here did, not even the higher-ups, not even my constituents.” Five’s muttering to himself now, a steady chant of no, no, no. “No one realized what you were, what you meant. We had all been focused on Vanya.”

No, no, no.

No, it can’t be true. 

Five did not suffer for forty five years of insanity inducing isolation to be the sole cause of the apocalypse. Five did not spend a lifetime in a prison of his own design. Five did not murder people out of the sake of desperation to only lead to the very thing he was trying to justify their deaths by avoidning. He did not. There’s no fucking way, the universe hates him, yes, but there’s no way, no way-

“Don’t you just love irony?” Carmicheal asks, grinning. “Such a fitting end to the story. You know, I’d always been partial towards stories where the hero goes through a reverse arc. A corruption, if you will.”

No, no, no.

Energy pulses under Five’s skin. He can feel it, can feel the thrum of time beat in rhythm to his pulse, can feel the energy rush through him. It’s like the barn incident, where panic and adrenaline fueled his powers. Jumpstarting him into rewinding time. Energy pulses, pulses, pulses-

“You know, your own father knew of the dangers you represented.” Carmichael leans on the arm of his chair. 

“Unfortunately, Reginald was the man who, and I say this loosely, raised you. He knew you. Your weakness. Your personality. Your strength. He had journals after journals dedicated to every minute detail about you and your siblings. He knew what you were like, the moody teenager you were. He knew how volitive you were, how desperate you were to please, how anxious you were to learn. He knew.

“Telling you no was a sure-fire way to make you do something. He needed you out of the equation because he believed that getting rid of you would avoid the apocalypse. It’s just like with Vanya, it’s just like with Ben- your father knows the danger you represent, knows your powers are uncontrollable. He spent years attempting to tame you children, and he never succeeded.

“He tricked you into leaving your timeline. He sent Ben on that mission, knowing he would die, knowing his own monsters would turn on him during the chaos of the battle. He medicated Vanya, knowing she was unstable but compliant as long as she was on that medication. He knew your powers were unstable, untrainable, and realised the danger you are.”

No. No. No.

“I doubt he knew what would happen to you, other than you would be out of his hair. He knew time travel was dangerous, but he also knew how to teach it to you, if he so pleased. He knew your arrogance would lead you far away from your siblings. He split you up, thinking that would help in restoring the timeline, in keeping the end of the world from happening, and that caused the downfall of not only the Umbrella Academy but the world.”

Carmiceal laughs. “Ironic, isn’t it? Your life story is so full of ironies. Your father sends you away, thinking it will save the world, but all it does is fuel the very thing he was trying to end. Perhaps you and your old man aren’t so different, after all.”

No, no, there’s no way his father intentionally let him rot in the future. There’s no way his father let him run off in the hopes of avoiding the apocalypse, hoping Five would die during his attempts because he saw Five’s real potential. There’s no way his father did that, no, no, no-

But he would- he would- he never does anything without a plan, and Reginald definitely knows about time travel, and if he had just cautioned Five to start small instead of just saying no, Five would have stuck around, Five wouldn’t have abandoned his family, Ben wouldn’t have been sent on that suicide mission, Vanya could have been rescued- no- no- 

“I’m just so curious to see what will happen. What would have happened, had we left you to your own devices? Had we not reached out and offered you a job here? What would the apocalypse have manifested as? And of course, now, in this fuck up of a timeline you’ve made, how will the apocalypse manifest now?”

It’s all a game. It’s all only ever been a game. 

Five has been nothing more than a pawn for this company. And now the Commission is turning him into a queen, into a force to be reckoned with, to cause the third and final apocalypse. He’s being manipulated, he knows this, but everything is starting to click into place, and is it manipulation if you know every word is true?

The Commission just wants to watch the world burn. 

Maybe, just maybe, Five wants to, too.

-

What AJ Carmichael says is mostly true. He’s seen the infinite switchboard, and knows exactly what Five is capable of. There is a reason the apocalypse trails after him like a woman’s mourning veil. Five is the cause, but he’s just not the only one. It’s all of his siblings, a mixture of variables that keep resulting in the same thing, over and over.

They’re running out of time, though, because Five’s siblings are learning. They’re healing, becoming less unstable.

In this case, AJ decided to go the more straightforward route. Vanya isn’t the bomb this time; she’s far too stable, especially with her time in Hotel Oblivion. The rest of the siblings have matured because of their years apart from each other. The hotel had accidentally forced them all to work together, this time without Five’s intervention and involvement, and they began to grow up. Reginald banished them only for them to become stronger. They’ve learned to move on and to forgive each of their siblings and welcome them into their family.

Yet as ironic as only fate can be, Five wasn’t given the same amount of time as his peers. Three weeks is all he’s had with them, and that’s not enough time for him to properly grow. He’s still just that pathetic little thirteen year old boy who abandoned his siblings in both a show of pride and desperation. He is still an absolute wreck, a piece that can still be manipulated. 

The apocalypse must happen. They made a deal, and they must keep their bargain. Their constituents will be very upset if they can’t fix the mess that’s been made of this timeline.

But Five is the apocalypse bringer. No matter the timeline, no matter how or why or when, it always can be pinpointed to him. He’s the variable in the equation that changes everything, the independent variable that affects the rest of time. Be it his absence or involvement, the fact remains that Five is the key factor. His siblings exasperate his involvement, but ultimately, Five will become his own undoing.

AJ watches as Five begins to lose his control. The man child was never very good at hiding his emotions- he was cold and calculating but he was an easy book to read. Most people just never bothered to crack him open.

But AJ did. AJ ripped him open, rifled through his insides, found a heart of gold and tossed it to the side. He picked through his brain, he ripped out things he didn’t like, and he altered the man’s very genes. He knows Five, inside and out.

He is on his last nerves. His siblings are missing, his father’s cronies are hunting him, he’s lived through hell since he was thirteen, his isolation’s been driving him mad, his biological urge to draw carnage is swinging back in full force, and he is utterly, utterly, emotionally exhausted. He’s been through the wringer for the past few weeks, and AJ knows that realising it was all for nothing is the last straw. Five was always at a breaking point, and he just neeed one more chink to his armour.

Five is shaking, shaking, shaking. He’s rattling like a child found a Christmas present and was trying to figure out what was inside. His heavy breathing is the only sound for miles. Energy pulses off of him in waves.

The drug pumping through Five is certainly going to help spur the apocalypse. It’s made specifically to remove any limitations Five might have from his powers, until it all runs out. Carmichael thinks it’ll be about three hours before that happens, and that’s plenty of time for Five do his dirty work.

AJ leans over and runs his hand through Five’s hair. It causes him to flinch, no doubt reminding him of the Handler. Ah, AJ wishes she hadn’t turned out to be a bad investment. Shooting her felt wonderful, knowing she had plans to undermine him, but he admits, he would have liked to watch her toy with Five a bit more. 

“It’s your destiny,” AJ whispers. “There’s no shame in embracing what you are. At least this time, you can make sure that you die right alongside your siblings.”

Five’s eyes snap open. 

They’re bright blue, energy wafting.

AJ grins.

-

Allison crumples the bill in her hand. “What do you mean you don’t know where Five is?”

They stood outside of an electronics shop. TVs that had seen better days were playing various channels, static noise as the superheroes stop running. A man on a bench a few feet away from them gives them a peculiar look, but goes back to reading his newspaper.

Ben… not their Ben, but Sparrow Ben- oh, this is still so confusing- gives her a sympathetic look. “I thought he was at the hotel, trying to break you out. He disappeared about a day ago, and none of my siblings have found him.”

A breeze fluttered through Allison’s hair, and she glanced at Vanya, who looked a bit paler than before. “Where could he have gone? He’s our only hope for escaping this timeline.”

Ben shrugs, and appears sheepish. “If I knew, I promise, I would tell you. I…I just want to help you guys get home.”

Diego runs his fingers through his hair. “God, our lives are so messed up. Can we do a quick rundown of what’s happened? Because I feel like I’m losing track of all this bullshit!”

Luther looks thoughtfully at Vanya. “Hm, well, Vanya ended the world twice, we ended up here in an alternate timeline where we all exist but live much happier lives since Dad didn’t adopt us, Ben’s alive, Dad works with the Commission and used them to capture us to put in his weird hotel-prison after hunting us down for sport thinking we were going to cause an apocalypse-”

“Which-” Klaus interrupts, adjusting the butterfly clip in his hair. “He kind of has a point there.”

“Hey, we haven’t caused the apocalypse, and look!” Diego snatches a newspaper from an older man, who immediately smacks him with a cane. Diego apologizes profusely, but still doesn’t give the newspaper back, instead pointing at the date at the top. “It’s April 11th, the day Herb and Dot told us the world would end!” He hands the magazine back to the old man, who curses at him and smacks him one more time.

Allison’s eyes narrow. “Wait, that means we’ve only been missing for three days. There is no fucking way we only spent three days in that god awful hotel.”

“The room service was awful,” Klaus moaned, throwing a hand to his forehead. “No pancakes! A staple of American breakfast, and they didn’t even have it! Not even a waffle substitute!”

“It felt like months,” Vanya adds, peering at the televisions behind them. Her eyes are centred on the date stamped in the corner. 

“Time works differently in the Hotel,” Ben begins. “For us, it’s been three days, for you, it’s been…” He pauses, and begins counting on his fingers. “Oh, say, six months?”

“SIX MONTHS?!”

Ben winces. “I would have come rescued you sooner, but in all honesty, I wasn’t really convinced you guys wouldn’t try to end the world until I talked to your little brother-“

“Not little-“ Ben gives Luther a strange look. “-it’s a long story, and a lot of math, and-“

“Well, at least you rescued us.” Allison sighs. Now isn’t the time to get into the bizarre life of their oldest brother. “But this means we don’t have much time to avert the apocalypse.”

“Dot and Herb could have lied to us,” Diego says, hands itching towards his knives. “They’re backstabbing bastards, we have no reason to trust them. Besides, it’s April 11th, and nothing’s gone wrong yet!”

He motions around them, waving a hand around the city. “See! No apocalypse!”

“Uh…. “ Ben bites his lip, his eyes trained on something behind Allison’s shoulder. “I think… I think you spoke too soon, man.”

Everyone turns towards Ben’s line of vision. One of the skyscrapers has begun to rust, and teeters on the verge of falling. The rust continues to climb up the side of the building, and chunks begin to fall. Civilians begin to sprint away, and the skyscraper collapses, caving in. 

Diego frowns. “Um, well, that’s not necessarily an indication of the end of the world. Just a structurally unsound building…”

Another one falls to the ground. Then another, then another, then another…

Diego clenches his knife. “Okay, well, just a lot of unsafe buildings- don’t you guys have regulations in this timeline?”

A bright blue burst of energy appears in the sky a while away from the collapsed buildings. A hole tears through the blue in the sky, and objects begin to fly towards it as the hole sucks things up underneath it. More of these holes begin to pop up over the city, and buildings continue to crumble.

The channels on the TV switch to news reports. A blonde woman shuffles paper on her desk, before saying, “We have breaking news! Sightings of mysterious black holes have appeared over various parts of the North American continent-” She glances off screen- “Across the entire world, sucking things up and causing untold damage. Reports of casualties are incoming.”

Diego tosses his hands in the air. “God fucking damnit!”

Ben stares at the hole in the sky. “Black holes? Those are- that’s impossible-”

“Come on,” Klaus chides, leaning his elbow on Ben’s shoulder. “You have interdimensional monsters in your gut. I talk to dead people. One of your siblings is a fucking cube. Are black holes really the weirdest thing you’ve seen?”

Ben pauses. “Fair.”

“You know, I feel like it really says something that none of us are panicking,” Vanya says, her voice shaking and clearly showing how panicked she actually is. “Our lives are just this strange, huh?”

“Maybe instead of standing here, we should figure out the source of this,” Allison suggests with a sigh. “Because this is definitely the apocalypse.”

Diego stomps his foot. “Can’t the world stay saved for one fucking day?”

Luther placed a hand on his shoulder. “Maybe third time’s the charm?”

Ben moves towards the front, eyes settled on the new reports. “It looks like the energy is centered in down town. Look, there’s a blue blip.”

Footage from a helicopter shows a shaky sighting of a blue energy force next to a bank. Moments after the energy moves away from the bank, the entire building begins to crumble like ash. Dust billows about, but the blue energy remains a clear beacon.

“That’s off of 3rd and Maple street!” Diego shouts. “Come on, let’s go!”

-

If Allison was honest, Five being the cause of the apocalypse is both a complete surprise but also, upon reflection, completely predictable.

They arrive about ten minutes later. The holes in the sky continue to expand, and buildings continue to crumble. Strangely, as they run, they notice patches of the earth dying, plants wilting and drying in mere seconds, while other patches seem to remain frozen in time, evergreen. She sees a bumblebee stuck midair, hovering over a pot of daffodils, its wings not moving.

People run in the opposite direction, and she notices that they’re aging, too. She watches a woman’s wrinkles smoothe, her hair grow longer and become a vibrant blonde, her gait stronger as she seems to lose twenty years of her life in as many seconds. A little boy toddling alongside his mother begins to grow, from her knee height towards her waist, and when she moves to pick him up, he’s already a teenager, awkward and lanky and taller than her.

The siblings all seem to notice this, but no one voices anything. Allison suspects the Commission’s involvement- perhaps after the Hargreeves failed to cause the apocalypse, they took matters into their own hands. Five did say that those briefcases were more dangerous than they appear.

They reach Maple and 3rd just in time to watch another building collapse. Dust and smoke billow out into the streets, and Vanya sends an energy pulse, a wave of wind slicing the fog in two. The siblings glance towards her and she offers a shy smile before Luther shouts, “There it is!”

The smoke fades and a blue figure begins to move towards them. The figure is short, and a blue energy surrounds them, reminding Vanya of Harlan in the barn. It can’t be Harlan…?

The figure becomes closer, and Ben is the first to recognise who it is. “Isn’t that your brother?”

The brothers glance between each other, and Allison knows they’re doing a headcount. “Um, we’re all here?”

“Except for Five,” Diego whispers, his eyes centered on the figure.

Klaus waves his words away. “Oh, please! Five’s whole schtick is trying to _avoid_ the apocalypse! Why would he cause it?”

“He’s been missing for a day,” Vanya adds, cautiously, and Klaus’s hand falters a bit. 

They begin to slowly move towards the figure, just as it continues to move towards them. Allison can plainly see at this distance, it really is Five. 

“Holy shit,” she breathes. “Who knew Five’s power could do all this?”

She had assumed this was the Commissions doing. But clearly all this time warping had to be Five’s power. Since when could he create black holes? Since when could he cause people to age so rapidly?

Allison misses the days when all their powers were just straightforward.

Diego cracks his knuckles. “Well, we have to stop him!”

“We’re not going to fight him!” Vanya hisses, her eyes glowing. “You remember how well that worked for me?”

She’s gotten a lot more confident, Allison notes, and decides that’s a good thing. “We need to reason with him, Diego.”

“He’s drugged,” Klaus adds, watching Five with a curious expression. “Rather rude of him to immediately attempt to replace me as the family addict!”

Everyone turns towards Klaus with a curious expression. He shrugs. “Look at the way he’s walking. I've been on enough trips to recognise one, and I’m sure this trip is not a good one. Probably as bad as that one time I thought I was getting chased by elephants with machine guns. Quite terrifying.”

Five arrives, barely a few meters away from them. Allison can see his eyes are far away, and his gait is off kilter. He drags his hands along the sides of the buildings, and Allison watches as rust trails after his finger tips before spreading throughout the entire building. The grocery store collapses in on itself, and Vanya shifts the wind to blow the dust in the opposite direction.

Flowers bloom from every step Five takes. It’s quite awe inspiring to watch as life grows beneath his feet while he destroys skyscrapers. 

Unconsciously, the family shifts to part for him. Five continues to move, and begins to walk right through them, without even noticing their presence.

“Five!” Diego shouts, reaching out to grab his shoulder. Five doesn’t stop walking, and Diego places his hands on his jacket. In an instant, his hand begins to whither, his veins popping as wrinkles appear, his fingers become boney and frail, and Diego wrenches his hand off Five’s shoulder. “Five?”

Five’s unfocused eyes slide around each sibling as he stops walking. His eyes are blue, bright and gleaming, dangerous and electric. Allison frowns at the sight. The blue matches the energy pooling at his hands, like they did for a jump, and she’s pretty sure he’s glowing from within, too. His eyes should be green. Sharp, emerald green.

“Don’t worry,” Five states, calmly, and for one strange moment, Allison’s anxiety did dissipate at his level voice. “I won’t let it be painful for you.”

Five suddenly grabs Luther’s hand and pulls him forward. A flash of something shiny and Five is attempting to shank Luther in the neck. Holy shit.

Klaus throws himself at Five, and the boy lets go of Luther, stumbling back. Klaus immediately disentangles from Five, and- did he- he looks almost ten years older than the last time Allison looked at him, which was just five seconds ago. Klaus glances at his reflection in some broken glass, and a smile breaks out as he runs his fingers through greying hair. “Ugh, I knew I’d make a handsome cougar.”

“Did Five just try to murder me?” Luther asks, eyes wide.

Five huffs. “I promise you, you don’t want to be around for what I’m about to do.”

“Oh my god, he's finally lost it?” Diego cries, his voice a bit high pitched. “He’s lost it! You’re really going to kill us!”

“Don’t make this harder than it has to be,” Five says, plainly. “I figured I ought to save you from the horrors of feeling time collapse in on itself. You deserve painless, quick deaths.”

“Five,” Vanya whispers, “what are you talking about? What are you doing?”

There’s a laugh bubbling in Five’s throat. It’s a manic sound, nothing at all like the laugh Allison remembers, when Klaus would tell a particularly bad joke, when Ben read few lines from a joke book, when Diego accidentally threw a dodgeball in Pogo’s face. It was manic, borderline desperate, and Allison watched as it escaped Five’s throat with the grace of a feral cat.

“What does it look like I’m doing?” Five asks, giggling, cackling, throwing back his head before looking Vanya straight in the eye, a grin splicing his face in two. “I’m ending the fucking world!”

Another black hole forms a few kilometres away. An entire building is swallowed this time, and Allison watches with hooded eyes as Griddy’s disappears, brick by brick. He’s still laughing, laughing, laughing, so hard he’s having trouble breathing.

“While I’m sure you have good reasons,” Klaus says, and he looks like he actually thinks that, “could you tell us why?”

It’s at this point that Allison realises Five’s laughter is no longer laughter. Five hiccups, and his small frame shudders, and Allison realises his laughter has dissolved into sobs, as he chokes on his own breath, as the energy surrounding him seems to grow brighter.

“I don’t have a choice,” Five says, quietly. “It’s my fault, it’s always been my fault, and I’ve been a fool to think we could stop the inevitable!”

“Five, buddy, what do you mean?”

“The apocalypse is destined to happen!” Five shouts, and this time, he’s laughing through his tears. He throws his hands up, tilts his head back and shouts at the sky, “And I’m destined to fucking cause it! No matter what time line, no matter where we are, the apocalypse is destined to happen because of me! It’s inevitable! It’s the only fucking constant in this shitty life! The end of everything!”

Allison frowns, shifting her weight. “Who told you this?”

Five runs his fingers through his hair. “AJ Carmichael.”

Vanya and Luther bristle at the name. They glance at each other, remembering the Commission files they had sorted through, remembering Five’s file. Dot and Herb had called them to the Commission’s library, under the guise that they might find more information on how to get home to their time, only for it to be a trap. The Sparrows had found them and had managed to wrangle them to Hotel Oblivion with little fanfare, since Luther was distracted by the cube and Vanya didn’t have much control over her powers.

Before all that, they did manage to find Five’s file, from their home timeline. They know what AJ did to him. They knew what a vile man he was, they knew about the DNA alteration. Diego recognised the name, while the other siblings glanced at each other, uncertain.

“You can’t trust that man, Five,” Luther argues. “What he did to you- he’s manipulating you.”

“It’s not manipulation if it’s true.” Five runs a hand over his face. “I ran the calculations, over and over, over and over, because I didn’t believe him, because all the Commission does is lie, lie, lie, lie!”

Five does a little spin, and the cement cracks a few yards away, a large sinkhole appearing. A fire hydrant bursts next to it.

“They lie, they lie, they lie! They promised me a way back home to you, but then said I could only retire to a time period of my choosing before I was born! They said it would only be five years, but there is no such thing as time in the Commission! They said the operation would be painless- and it- and it!” Five stutters off, shuddering, his eyes glowing brighter. “They said they’d let us go home, and they lied. Herb and Dot promised us, and they lied! They’re corrupt bastards! But fuck! They weren’t lying about this!”

Five pulls at his hair. Allison reaches out to touch him, but he flinches away, violently, stumbling back. 

“I ran the calculations! I caused the first apocalypse and the second apocalypse and now I’m causing the third!”

“I hate to break it to you,” Klaus begins, cautiously, “but little Vanya caused the apocalypses, not you!”

“You don’t understand!” Five shouted, voice breaking. “You don’t understand! You don’t understand!”

“Then help us understand, Five,” Ben tried, his voice soft, and Five looked as if he had been slapped in the face.

“None of you ever wanted to understand!” Five screamed. “Both times I warned you about the apocalypse, and both times you guys rejected me! Now that I’m finally okay with letting the apocalypse happen, now you want to stop it!”

Everyone ignores Ben’s questioning look. Luther winces and Vanya glances away at the ground.

“Well, you had your chance! I’m going to destroy the entire fucking time stream and there’s nothing you can do about it!” Five crossed his arms. “I’m going to destroy the very fabric of reality. No one will survive- not Earth, not the Commission, not you, and not me! This time, it will be the end of everything!”

“Five, come on, you can’t be serious-“

“It’s the only way!” Five stomps his foot and the cement turns to nothing but a loose pile of dust. “The Commission won’t stop until the world ends, and the world will only keep ending! We can’t stop the inevitable, and we were fools to think so! The end must happen! So I’m making it happen!”

“It doesn’t have to be this way!” Allison shouts. “We can take down the Commission, we can stop the apocalypse. We’re a family, Five, and you’re included, too. We work together and we’re healing and growing. We can stop the apocalypse.”

Five shakes his head. He grips the knife tight in his hand. “No, we can’t.”

A blink, and he’s gone.

Diego senses it, the shifting of air particles, but he’s not fast enough. Five appears on his back, his hands wrapped around his throat, and if Vanya wasn’t so quick to toss a ball of energy at Five, he’s pretty sure his neck would have been snapped. Diego falls to the ground, stuttering for breaths as Five disappears from behind him.

There’s a brick in his hand and before anyone can move, Five reappears beside Vanya. She focuses on the sounds of Five’s breathing, but she doesn’t have a complete mastery over her powers, and she’s not fast enough. Five smashes the brick to her head, and she loses focus, crumpling to the ground. Unused energy bursts from her in the form of angry wind, and the rest of the Academy finds themselves being pushed back.

Five flashes, back and forth, dancing between his siblings. He slashed at Klaus’s side, he kicked Allison in the ribs, he grabbed one of Diego’s knives from midair and stabbed Luther’s arm. The blade doesn’t lodge very deep, and Five yanks it down, carving a line of red into his arm before disappearing. He tossed a knife at Vanya, who managed to duck just in time. The knife sliced through her hair, though, and chunks of brown wafted to the floor.

“Hey, asshole!”

Allison and her siblings glance towards their right. Oh, shit.

The Sparrow Academy stood, in a perfect row. Allison knows they’ve been doing some emotional growing since the last time the Umbrella Academy and the Sparrows fought each other, about five days ago, but Allison doesn’t think it’s going to be enough.

Five’s fingers twitch. A brick appears in his hand in a flash of blue.

Their Number One, Marcus Hargreeves, watched his counterparts for a moment, and after realising he caught their attention, he continues, “I’ll be honest, I didn’t think our old man was truthful about the apocalypse, and I definitely didn’t think it’d be a kid that causes it, but, well. You guys are full of surprises.”

“Not a kid,” Five growls, lowly, and he’s shifting to strike.

“I kind of feel bad about fighting a kid,” Fei admits, rubbing her arm. “I mean, he’s just a little guy.” She had considered him a friend, too- they only briefly interacted, but she realised how much they were alike. Smart, but all they ever wanted was a friend. 

“Stay out of this!” Diego shouts, rolling his arm. “This is… this is family drama! You’re not invited!”

“This is the end of the world,” Alphonso shouts. “I think we have a right to butt in on this.”

Well, Allison thinks, they do have a point.

“Fine!” Five shouts, and he sounds a bit hysterical. “I can take all of you! I can fight all of you! I'm a trained assassin, I can kick your asses!”

“Cocky little shit,” Jayme mutters, and Alphonso snorts.

“No, actually, he is a trained assassin, so be careful!” Klaus calls.

“Stop wasting my time! I have a fucking world to end!”

“If you’re destroying time, then can you really run out of it?” Ben asks. “I mean, you can take your time destroying time.”

Five disappears with a huff, appearing on top of Marcus. He readies a knife to his throat, and Diego pats down his harness, realising Five stole one while he wasn’t looking. Birds begin to flutter towards them, as Jayme calls on her power, but Five sends a wave of energy towards them and the birds stop mid flight, frozen in time.

Jayme and Alphonso share an uneasy look.

This is getting out of hand.

Allison hesitates, “I heard a ru-“

Five is at her side before she can finish, punching her in the gut. Allison doubles over and reaches towards him, but Five moves too quickly. He reappears by Diego, who throws a knife at him. Five dodges the knife, which then continues to fly through the air until it lands in Sloane. “Shit!”

The cube begins to glow a bright green, and Luther winces, knowing what it’s about to do. Five suddenly freezes in place, his entire body stiffening, and Luther wonders what sort of nightmare Christopher is concocting.

Vanya readies an energy strike before Five suddenly begins to move. He disappears before appearing right next to the cube. He grabs Christopher and starts to shake him like a rattle, grinning manically.

“How cute!” Five sings. “But I’m already living my worst nightmare!”

He flings the cube towards Alphonso, who ducks. Unfortunately, Jayme didn’t get the memo, and the cube knocks into her before it can recalibrate its flight pattern.

The birds suddenly unfreeze and continue their course, right at Marcus. Talons outstretched, they pierce his skin. He’s much more durable than the average person, but it still hurts like hell. “Jayme, call them off!”

Five grins manically, twirling a brick. Allison’s seen that look before, when a stray dog appeared at the academy once. It had hungry eyes, but it looked absolutely dead inside. Diego killed it when Dad turned it into a training mission, and Diego cried for days after. Allison only realises it years later that the dog had rabies, and was dying anyway.

Five reminds her of a rabid dog.

Ben unleashed his tentacles, and Five disappears. He reappears beside Klaus, shoving him towards Luther. Luther catches Klaus with ease, but before the two of them could move, reality shifts, and suddenly Luther and Klaus switch places with Jayme, Alphonso, and Sloane. All five of them appear disoriented, and the Horror strikes, knocking the three Sparrows off their feet.

Five is laughing, looking almost ecstatic at the chaos he’s causing.

Jayme whistles and the birds flutter away from Marcus, changing course towards Five, who reappears next to Diego and snatched a knife. Diego attempts to grab him, but Five evades. The birds attempt to follow him.

The birds freeze in place. In fact, everyone becomes frozen.

Five glances at the frozen figures of his siblings, and smiles. He drags Diego next to the Horrors, where a tentacle is about to lash out. He turns Alphonso, who’s about to stab himself, towards Vanya, who he then turns towards him. He moves Allison next to Vanya, taking Klaus’s scarf and gagging her.

He pushed Klaus in front of the swarm of birds, and moved Marcus and Luther, with a lot of strained effort, next to Vanya as well. He kicks the cube towards Vanya, letting it hover in mid air a few feet away from her. 

The knives Diego had begun to toss were still en route to where Five had been. Five pushes those knives in the direction of Jayme and Sloane, giggling as their course is altered.

He glances at all of them, amused, and snaps his fingers.

A lot of things happen at once.

The Horror grabs Diego and hurls him towards Jayme and Sloane. Before Diego makes contact with them, the knives he had thrown lodge themself into their abdominal cavities. Jayme, Diego, and Sloane go down in a pile of flesh.

At the same time, Alphonso has his full attention on Vanya and stabs himself in the gut. Vanya, who’s looking at Alphonso, starts screaming as a stab wound appears on her gut. A rush of adrenaline and fear skyrocket through her and cause her powers to go unstable.

Electricity crackles around her and strikes the nearest victims. Allison goes flying while Luther and Marcus collapse to the ground, twitching a bit from being electrocuted. The cube sails past Vanya’s head and knocks into Ben, who was also struck by Vanya’s lightning. The Horror has gone ballistic now, and is trying desperately to latch onto something. Ben is dazed and can not focus enough to control it. 

At the same time, Klaus is getting pecked by a giant swarm of birds. “Aw! Jesus, fuck! Nasty little bastards.”

Five stands back, grinning madly as the Horror grabs on to the nearest people, Luther and Marcus, and hurls them like dolls. The birds shift away from Klaus after a few moments, and he listens to a symphony of groans.

It feels… it feels so _good_.

The hair on the back of Five’s neck raises, but Five isn’t fast enough.

A bullet slices the tense air, and strikes Five right in the back of the neck.

Everyone is too busy trying to recover from their wounds to notice Five collapsing, except for Klaus.

-

AJ Carmichael is often unable to admit he’s made a mistake. This time, he realises, he has made a very, very bad mistake.

If Five succeeds in destroying the entire time stream, the universe will cave in on itself, and this timeline will cease to exist. This would be very, very bad, because that means all life on this planet, and all life on any other planet, would also cease to exist. And because this timeline is the main timeline, the tree trunk to the trees branches, it could have many, many, many negative ramifications for the other timelines branching off of it.

Suffice to say, this is a very bad situation for Carmichael.

“Yes, I know,” he says, pressing the phone against his glass. “Yes, I’m well aware that the Boy is about destroy all life as we know it- yes, yes. No, I agree. To be fair, I wasn’t expecting his powers to manifest like that, per ce- no, yes, I see-“

He glances at Dot and Herb, who have their eyes latched onto the infinite switchboard. The Earth is crumbling under the weight of so many black holes, and Five is attempting to launch the planet forward through time, similar to his attempt at reversing time in that barn. That would be all well and good, except he’s also yanking at the very fabric of reality and space time, and is sending the entire universe into a bit of a frenzy. Stars are dying when they’re not supposed to, and supernovas are reversing.

Oh, this is bad.

“Yes, yes, we can fix this- I’ll send a corrections team to eradicate him- yes, I know how dangerous he is, I made him that way- yes, I have a plan!” God, he hates talking to the higher ups. “If this doesn’t work, then you can launch your plan, alright? Let me try!”

He glances at the screen on the bottom left. Five is currently talking to the Sparrow Academy. They still have some time. “Herb, call the temps agents and let them know their new mission: arrive at 5:55:55 pm at Chicago at Maple and 3rd. Their target is to kill Five Hargreeves. I don’t care how. I don’t care how many bullets it takes to get him dead. And after they shoot him down, they’ll need to shoot him again. The old man’s a tricky fellow.”

Herb nods frantically and moves towards the office to write the note. Dot watches Five, biting her lip, as he begins to attack the Sparrows. “What exactly did you do to him, sir?”

The Five she knows would never, never lay a hand on his family. He killed people to protect them, to save the world. He’s not a good person, but Dot never in a million years would have thought that he would be capable of hurting his family. It was his Achilles heel, something they dangled over his head like a rabbit and a carrot. It was his well established weakness.

AJ sighs and crosses his arms. “I simply told him the truth. Let’s just hope our field agents aren’t completely incompetent, or else neither of us is going to get that salary bonus in three weeks.”

Dot remains silent, her eyes focused on Five.

-

Klaus watches as Five collapses to the ground. The others are busy with a few, more serious wounds. Klaus straggles towards his brother, desperately hoping what he thinks just happened didn’t happen.

Sure, Five was trying to end the world, and yeah, that’s bad, but Klaus can’t really find it in his heart to blame him much. The guy’s got a lot to be pissed about, and after stopping two separate apocalypses, it’s hard not to think that maybe the world was just destined to end.

He makes it to his body. His body. 

Oh god, his body.

Five is face down on the ground, and Klaus rolls him onto his back. Five’s eyes stare listlessly at the sky. He’s not breathing, and Klaus frantically tries to find his pulse. No, he’s not watching another brother die, he can’t have another person die in his arms, not again, not like Ben, not like Dave-

He’s seventeen again, seventeen and watching Ben choke on his own blood, his own gore strewn across the floor, his guts twisting out of his body. There’s no way to save him, not enough blood in the world to save him, and no way to put everything back in its place. Allison is trying, trying so hard to stop his bleeding, but his entire abdomen is ripped open, and it’s hard to decipher where the tentacles begin and end, and where his chest starts. Ben tries to speak, but the light behind his eyes fade, and Klaus never learns what he was going to say even after the funeral-

He’s an adult in Vietnam, fighting in the trenches, covered in blood and sweat and dirt. Ten months he’s spent in this war, ten months he’s spent beside the love of his life, and in the back of his mind he always knew it could never last, but he thought he’d have more time, more time, but then Dave is shot, bullets ripping through his skin and Klaus hovers beside him, trying to get him to wake up, wake up, wake up because this can’t be the fucking end, because this is his world ending for a second time-

He’s an adult in the middle of a ruined street, holding his baby brother’s body in his arms and sobbing. Five can’t be dead, he can’t be dead, because he had disappeared for seventeen years- for forty years- and he did not come back here just to die before he could start living. He’s not thirteen, Klaus knows this, knows this better than any of his siblings but when he looks at the body all he can think of is a thirteen year old kid who saw way too much way too soon, and all Klaus can feel is grief.

He knows he’s being selfish, but he hopes, he hopes that Five won’t go towards the light just yet. Klaus wanted to get to know Five more before one of them kicked the bucket (and he always assumed that he would die first, not Five). 

A flicker of blue catches his attention. He glances up in time to see Five standing there, staring down his body with something akin to cold, shrewd calculation. Klaus drops his body with a thud and oh, that might’ve been rude, but Five is still here, technically. “Five, Five, oh thank god!”

Five turns around. Klaus follows his line of sight. Temps assassins emerge from the wreckage of a building, bright red suits a glaring blot in the greys of the crumbled buildings. Five’s fists tighten.

Klaus has a bad, bad feeling.

“I know dying is probably a pretty big shock,” Klaus begins. “But don’t worry, Fivey, we’re-“

“Ben was able to use his powers even though he was dead, wasn’t he?”

Klaus didn’t like where this was going. “Don’t tell me you’re going to try to end the world when you’re dead?”

Five flashes him a sharp smile. “I won’t be dead for long.”

Klaus doesn’t have enough time to react.

-

Five rewinds time. 

It’s surprisingly easier this time, when he’s already dead, no bullets lodged in his chest as he’s sputtering for his last breath. It’s easy, as easy as throwing a ball in the air and catching it, as easy as ripping holes in space.

Klaus freezes, then begins to rewind. Five watches as Klaus picks his body back up, then lowers it, then begins to scramble backwards towards where the birds had attacked him. Five turns his attention back towards the temps agents, watching as they disappear back into the rubble, as red disappears from his vision.

Well, that’s not true.

Five knows this rage is not his own. Five is often angry, yes, but he had long since learned that the bloodlust he feels was genetically manufactured by the very entity trying to kill him. Carmichael loves ironies, doesn’t he? Five hopes he enjoys the irony of his perfect weapon destroying everything he has.

Five feels himself get pulled back into his body. That is a strange feeling, one Five hopes he’ll never feel again. He plans to die and stay dead soon, preferably within the next hour after the universe implodes, but he can’t do that until he actually causes the end.

The wheels of time are at Five’s mercy. The end of times lay in his hands. The fabric of reality is at his finger tips. 

Five smiles as he finds himself gazing at the sight of all his siblings, dazed and confused, after his time freeze. Then, he slowly spins around, and greets the temps commission with a feral smile.

-

Diego half heartedly groans as he tries to shuffle off the two girls. Jayme kicks at him, trying to get him to get off, and Diego swats at her. Picking fights with allies isn’t the best strategy, but Diego’s admittedly more of a punch first then think of a plan person.

The sounds of manic laughter catch his attention, and as he slowly sits up, he watches as Five dodged a bullet he couldn’t have possibly known about. 

Five spins on his heels, facing a pile of rubble. “I know where you are!” He sings, and fuck, Diego won’t lie, chills are definitely running down his spin at the look in Five’s eyes.

Five disappears in a blink, and suddenly red blots begin to emerge from the rubble. They’re temps assassins, he realizes- they must be here to take out the other Hargreeves. After all, Carmichael needs Five to end the world…

Something about this doesn’t add up.

Five picks up a steel bar from the ruins of the building. Five disappears quickly, in the blink of an eye, and reappears, bashing in a temps’ skull. The man collapses in a heap of bones, and Diego can see brain matter splattered across rotted cement.

Five’s speaking now, and Diego tries to listen.

“Fast-“ the boy huffs, disappearing before reappearing between two agents. They move to shoot at him, but he disappears, causing their bullets to lodge in between their own ribs, killed by friendly fire. “Too fast!”

Five cackles as he shoves the steel bar through a man’s eye, ripping it out before jumping onto a different man, shoving it deep in his chest. “I am in the jungle and I am too fast for you!”

He jumps again, kicking a man in the head before slipping a knife out of his pocket- Jesus, he’s stealing all of Diego’s knives- and before Diego can blink, the man’s been disemboweled, brutally. He feels like his own stomach is about to leap out of his throat. “You have teeth and stripes and things that tear…”

He brutally slices the throat of another agent before completely tearing off the head of another. “But I am much too fast…”

Diego watched as he takes out an entire Commission squadron, watches as he repeatedly gouges out eyes, slits throats, and splices heads in half. The things he can do with one small knife makes Diego wonder a bit over the slaughter of the board of directors.

“You want my flesh but you don’t know where the jungle is. Only I know where the jungle is… only I know.”

He’s completely insane, Diego realises. He’s completely lost all his fucking marbles. Every ounce of composure he had, every bit of whatever has been holding him together has come undone. There’s a feral look in his eyes as he shoves the knife into a man's chest and tears into it, slitting the entire thing open. Blood gushes and splatters onto his clothes, and Five seems to almost relish in the feeling.

Five pauses, in the midst of all the carnage, his chest heaving, his eyes darting, looking for more victims. The entire squadron is down, though- completely and utterly dead. “I am a gazelle.”

Five laughs, manically. The world seems to rock for a moment, as Five drops to his knees, his hands glowing bright blue, touching the ground. Diego watches as more buildings begin to crumble around them, as plants begin to wither and die, as more foliage springs up before dying along with the rest. The birds in the air drop dead, and Diego watches as they begin to decay. The bodies surrounding Five are already withering, their blood drying, the bodies decaying like rotted meat.

“I am a gazelle and the jungle is my home!”

-

Five will admit, perhaps, he might be going insane at last.

At this point, Five isn’t quite sure if it’s a miracle he hadn’t lost it already, or if he had actually already lost it, a very, very long time ago. Prolonged isolation was, after all, a form of torture not widely used in many countries. It only takes barely two weeks for the mind to corrode. What happens when fifty years of solitary confinement happens to a person? What do they turn out like?

Five supposes the answer is him.

The carnage he committed feels wonderful, he’s on yet another high of the kill. He knows he’s going to regret this eventually, but he’s far too busy trying to end the world to care about the future. Once he’s done, there won’t even be a future, anyway. No past to be stuck in, no present to muck up, and no future to dread. Sounds wonderful, in all honesty.

Perhaps Five has cracked. But Five would be lying to himself if he said he didn’t think he was already splintering before this. Five is a murderer, a cheater, a shitstain of a human being, but he is not a liar.

Five was made to destroy things. Carmichael made sure of that, when he ruined what little normalcy Five had, when he turned his DNA into that of a serial killer. Five was made to destroy, to kill, to maim, it was all he was ever good at and it is all he will ever be. He’s a weapon, a rifle with a shiny scope and impeccable aim, a bomb that’s ready to explode at the word, a nuclear weapon excited to detonate. Five is nothing more than a glorified time bomb, a husk of a human, a piece of plastic designed to destroy.

He finds himself finally at peace with that fact.

-

“We all saw that, right?” Alphonso asks, staring directly at Five, who’s giggling to himself as he begins to launch the earth towards extinction. “We all saw that ten year old just murder like twenty people? Very, very brutally?”

Vanya’s eyes are trained on the corpses, on the blood staining Five’s face. For a moment, everyone stands perfectly still, completely and utterly unsure of how to continue.

“He’s playing with us,” Ben says, smacking a fist in his hand. “He could kill us all, pretty easily, I bet. We’re just toys. He’s toying with us.”

“There’s no way he could kill us like that,” Luther argues. “He wouldn’t do that!”

“Dude, he tried to fucking stab you in the neck, let alone the rest of the fight we just had!” Diego argues. “He’s a killer.”

Vanya frowns, and begins to inch towards him. The dirt beneath her feet crunches with the wilted plants that died before they were even supposed to bloom. “Five, this isn’t you!”

“It is,” Five answers, easily, contentedly. His eyes move up from the ground and lock onto Vanya. The sky is darkened, surrounded completely by black holes. Five smiles. “This is what I am.”

Klaus hums. “Well, I think that’s part of the problem, buddy. You’re not a what. You’re a who.”

Five’s eyes narrow. For a split second, he actually seemed surprised by that. “I haven’t been a who in a very long time. Now just let me end the world, alright? I tried to give you guys an easy way out, but since you refuse to let me kill you, then be a nice peanut gallery and sit back and watch the show.”

Allison steps away from the Sparrows. She’s managed to untie the gag, and she thinks about using her rumour. She just has to speak fast; that’s all she has to do.

But when she looks at Five, she admits, firstly, that she is afraid.

She does not recognise this person. It’s been fifty years since he’s seen them and twenty since they’ve seen him. He’s not the same boy who would pull stupid pranks with Klaus, he’s not the same boy who would eat marshmallow sandwiches with Vanya, who read and discussed books with Ben, who let Allison do his make up, who tried to talk sense into Luther and Diego when they quarreled. He’s not that thirteen year old boy they lost so long ago. She’s not even sure he’s really Five at all.

But when she looks into his eyes, into those blue, blue, eyes…. she sees that he’s crying. Tears are streaming down his face, slipping down his cheeks freely. Allison can’t remember ever seeing him cry.

And Allison doesn’t see a wretched little weapon, a time cracked assassin, a fifty eight year old man. She doesn’t even see a killer, even though she knows he is one.

Allison sees a very scared thirteen year old boy who has lost so much, who has nothing left to lose. 

She doesn’t rumour him.

She begins to close the gap. Luther’s eyes widen, and he reaches towards her, but she evades, side stepping him and continuing on.

“Allison, he’s dangerous!” Diego shouts, as if Allison didn’t also just see him massacre two dozen men. Vanya remains silent, watching, and Allison decides to interpret it as an agreement.

Five watches her with beady eyes, but he’s still crying. He probably doesn’t even realise he’s crying. 

A tentacle slithers towards Allison, and she says, “I heard a rumour that you stopped trying to stop me from doing what I want.”

Everyone’s eyes when white, before the rumour registered. Ben’s tentacles moved back into his chest. Luther remained as still as a statue, and Diego pocketed his knives. Fei and Jayme watched with interest, and Marcus glanced between Five and Allison, nervous tensions between his brow.

“Fine,” Alphonso states. “Go get yourself killed.”

As Allison continues to walk forward, she feels the pull of time beneath her veins. Her skin begins to grow thinner, her hair shifts towards a shimmering grey, and her veins begin to pop out. She can feel wrinkles form on her face, laugh lines etched near her lips. Perhaps, eventually, she will live to earn those wrinkles. She hopes Claire will. She’ll make sure Claire will.

Five doesn’t stop her, not even when she’s barely a foot away from him. She leans down to her knees and sits for a few moments by his side. He watches her curiously, and the blue energy surrounding him flickers.

“You don’t want to do this,” she simply states. She tries to sound calm, not accusingly, just stating a fact, like she was talking about the weather. “You don’t have to do things you don’t want to do.”

“I’ve only ever done things I didn’t want to do,” Five retorts. He sounds like a petulant child. It almost makes her laugh, except she knows the weight of his words.

“There’s a first time for everything.” She places her hands on top of his, slowly, cautiously, like she’s afraid of scaring a wild animal. She supposes she is. 

Five flinches from her touch, but he doesn’t move away. He stared at her for a few moments, before glancing at the ground. Shame flickers on his face.

“I never wanted to do any of this,” he whispers. “I never wanted to leave you guys behind, I was thirteen and stupid, so stupid, and my arrogance caused the end of the world. I never wanted to abandon you, I promise, I always wanted to come back, I thought I’d be able to come back, I just wanted- I just wanted…” He cuts himself off. “I wanted to come back.”

“And you did,” she reminds him, rubbing his knuckles. “You did come back, when we needed you most. You saved us, Five.”

He shakes his head. “No, no. I never saved you. I've failed you, three times. I watched you die, three times. Three times. And I’m trying to make it a fourth. The apocalypse happened three times, and I’m trying to make it a fourth.”

She tries to do the math as quickly as possible… three apocalypses? Definitely the 2019 one and the Dallas one… was the other maybe the original apocalypse he was trapped in, when he was 13? She thinks that makes sense.

But three times, he watches them die? He found their bodies in the future, he saw them die in a nuclear arms race, but what was that third time? “What do you mean, three times?”

She sees Klaus mouthing to her- “Long story. Barn.”

She struggles to understand what he means, until it clicks. The Handler had shown up, ready to start shooting, except Five had moved from behind Lila to attack her in time. How could he have known she would be there, unless…?

Oh.

“Five…”

He’s not listening. He keeps talking. “I never wanted to go to the apocalypse. I never wanted to be an assassin, I never wanted to kill, but I didn’t have a choice. Either I rot there or I get the opportunity to come back and save you all, save the world. I never wanted to become a killer, I never wanted my DNA modified, I never wanted any of this, I promise, I didn’t want to become this.”

Allison’s eyes skitter towards her siblings at the “DNA modification” part. Vanya catches her gaze and mouths, “Long story.” For Christ’s sake, if there’s one thing Allison didn't miss about this family, is the lack of communication.

“I didn’t want to be this,” Five whispers, desperately. “I didn’t want to do any of it, I didn’t want to, I don’t want to. I never wanted to hurt you, I never wanted to cause the apocalypse, but I don’t have a choice, I’ve never had a choice, I’ve never had a choice.”

Five keeps his head low, like he’s bowing, not daring to look at Allison. “I’m just so tired of not having a choice. This time I have a choice. If the world had to end, then it’s going to be by my rules, by my word. If the world is going to end, then I’m going to do it myself and make sure it’s done right.”

He looks up at Allison, pleading with her. “All I ever wanted was for you guys to grow up, like I was able to. All I ever wanted was to give you guys a chance at a happy and long life. But I can’t give you that.” Five stares at his hands, as energy pulses through the ground, as the earth continues to rotate towards extinction. “I can’t give you that.”

Allison knows Five is dangerous, that Five had done a lot of terrible, terrible things. She just witnessed him murder two dozen men, after all, and watched him try to kill her and her siblings. Five isn’t a good person.

Good intentions don’t mean much, but Allison just watches Five, and knows that he really never has had a choice. She doesn’t understand a lot of his life, doesn’t understand much of what he went through, but Five has been paying for one single mistake he made at thirteen for half a century. And all he ever wanted was to keep his family safe.

That… Allison can understand. If she had been in Five’s shoes, would she have made all the same mistakes? For her siblings? For Claire? 

“I’ve seen you die, three times,” Five continues, his voice soft. “I can’t save you. But this time, I just want to go down with you. Selfish, I know.”

Allison reaches up and cups Five’s face in her hands. She doesn’t know if she can forgive and forget so easily, she still has a few grievances with Vanya, too, but she knows that she can at least understand the motivation behind what Five is doing.

“It’s been a really shitty life, hasn’t it?” Five hesitates, but leans into her touch. She wonders how long it’s been since he’s been touched like this. Diego mentions the Handler had been strangely handsy with Five, but had he been touched out of love? How long has it been since he’s been hugged? Did anyone show him any affection when he showed up out of the blue in over a decade?

She sighs. “You made a lot of choices that I don’t agree with, Five, but you also didn’t have much of a choice. They never gave you a real choice. But Five, you do have a choice. Right here, right now. The world doesn’t have to end.”

“It’s destined to end,” he murmurs.

“You don’t really believe in destiny, do you? You would have died long before you came back here if you didn’t think you could fix everything. It’s not set in stone. We can at least try, Five.” She cups his face in her hands, and rubs away a few tears. “I would much rather die trying than die giving up. And I always figured you wouldn’t go down without a fight, either.”

There’s footsteps to her right. Vanya sits on her knees. She runs her fingers through her hair and gives Five a tired look. “Whatever Carmichael said to you isn’t true, alright? He’s just manipulating you. He wants you to cause the apocalypse, to do his dirty work. Don’t make it easy for him.”

Klaus slides in on Allison’s left. “The world sucks, definitely. But I still think it’s worth fighting for, since you guys live here, too.”

Luther moves behind Allison, hovering nervously. “I know you’ve had a rough time, old man, but if we’re destined to die, I’d really rather not be killed by you.”

Diego elbows Luther. “I want to go out in a blaze of glory, not murdered by a ten year old.”

Ben smacks Diego, rolling his eyes. “I’m not the Ben you remember, but you seem like a good guy. I know you’d do anything for your family. But it’s your choice.”

The Sparrows hover beside them, peering curiously at Five.

“Please don’t destroy the world,” Alphonso simply states

“I want the satisfaction of killing Reginald myself,” Jayme says, lowly.

“If it means anything, I know my team and I would be willing to help you stop the apocalypse,” Marcus offers. “Maybe that can change the tide.”

“We can’t be siblings if we’re dead,” Fei offers. “And I would really like to be your friend.”

“You’ve already lived through your worst nightmare,” the cube states, startling Luther. “How much worse can it get?”

“Just give it one more try,” Sloane says.

Five stares up at them all, soaking in the sight. These people don’t know anything about him, not the Umbrella Academy, not the Sparrow Academy. They don’t know all that he’s done, all that he will do. They don’t know him at all.

Allison pulls Five into a hug.

It’s the first hug he’s had in forty five years.

Vanya joins in, along with Klaus. Diego looks like he’d rather die but he still moves in with his arms stretched out. Luther hesitates before gently scooping them into his arms. Ben watches with a small smile, and the Sparrow Academy stays back, letting the others take over.

Five is surrounded on all sides, like a caged animal, and yet despite his instincts Five finds that he doesn’t want to get away.

Instead, he bursts into tears.

He sobs into Allison’s shoulder, silent wails causing his entire body to shudder. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I just- I just- I just wanted to be with you again.”

“I know,” Allison whispers. “We’ll make sure you’re never alone again.”

Five starts crying even harder. The blue in his eyes fades back to his normal green. The energy surrounding him dies, flickering into nothing. The black holes above slowly fade, dissipating. The sun brightens up the streets, and the Earth stops shaking.

Allison feels her skin grow thicker, her wrinkles smooth away, her veins pop back into place. She runs her fingers through his hair, trying to soothe him, trying to offer the compassion and love he hasn’t seen in forty years. Five just cries into her shoulder, cries and cries until he’s nothing but a miserable pile of sniffling.

“This was very heartwarming,” Alphonso says. “But, um, how do we fix all this?”

Allison winces at the destruction. Last time Vanya succeeded in actually destroying the world, they just jumped to a different timeline.

Five leaned away from Allison, rubbing his eyes. “I don’t have enough juice to reverse time… the briefcase that got left at Dad’s mansion when we first arrived is probably smashed…”

“Actually.” Ben raises his hand. “I have that.”

His tentacles spill out, and one of them drops it on the ground. Klaus looks absolutely amused at the sight of using his inter dimensional portal to hold things. 

“It’s a little slimy, but I have it.”

Of course, that’s how Ben rescued them from Hotel Oblivion. She was too busy trying to stop the apocalypse to realise what he had done with the briefcase.

Five’s eyes lit up. He scrambled towards the briefcase, flicking it open. “Fantastic. I can rewire this to send us back in time, before I started…” Five glances at the rubble around him. “Well, before I had my midlife crisis.”

Klaus outright laughs at that. “Is that what we’re calling your mental breakdown?”

Five narrows his eyes. “Don’t test me, young man.”

“Wait,” Luther begins. “Taking us back in time only means we’ll meet our past selves? Please, I do not want to witness another round of paradox psychosis.” Watching Five try to murder himself is not something he wants to repeat.

Five sucks in another breath and glances at the suitcase. “I’ll only send our consciousness back, not our bodies. It’ll take a lot of math to explain, so just trust me, alright?”

Diego looks ready to grumble something mean, but Vanua smacks him, and he sighs. “Alright, do your thing.”

It takes about ten minutes for Five to get it to work. “I’d already done the math for this before, I just have to account for… thirteen different people. But it should work…”

-

A flash of blue, and they’re sitting in the middle of the sidewalk in downtown. Vanya won’t pretend to understand at all the math or science of how that worked, but she’s just thankful it did.

Five collapses to the ground on shaky knees, huffing. Marcus manages to catch him before he falls, and Five is hoisted back up, his weight completely leaning on Marcus.

“I really, really overextended myself,” Five states. “The drug Carmichael gave me allowed me to go past my limits, but it’s definitely out of my system, now.” He runs his hand over his face. “Turns out ending the world drains you pretty badly.”

Klaus rubs his knuckles against Five’s head. “Don’t worry, mon frère, when we get back to the mansion, you can take the biggest nap in the history of naps. Fuck knows you need it.”

“A growing boy needs his sleep,” Diego snickers.

Five apparently had enough juice to finish a fight, because he kicks Diego in the shins.

“Hey, I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” Sloane begins, her eyes set on the sky. “But, um, I think we have another problem.”

They all glance up.

“ALIENS?” Diego shouts. “ALIENS? Are you FUCKING KIDDING ME?”

Hovering over downtown Chicago is a god damn mothership. Five let’s out a very tired sigh. “I wish I had the energy to be surprised.”

-

Carmichael makes a call.

“The plan… didn’t work. The kids are becoming too stable- they’re not going to be destroying the world any time soon…”

He rolls his eyes. Dot watches him as he leans against the switchboard. “I know, Five was a risky investment, and ultimately didn’t pay out. He didn’t end the world- well, he probably could have, but the power of love or whatever stopped him. It’s time to pull out the big guns.”

If the world won’t end itself, then it’s time to get their hands dirty.

“Yeah, yeah.” Carmichael sighs. “I understand. We’ll be ready. But get here fast, you don’t want to face them when they’re done resting. Yes, yes. See you soon.”

He snaps the flip phone shut. Dot watches with wide eyes as he moves toward the intercom system. He flicks the microphone before speaking.

“Attention, my wonderful workers. AJ Carmichael here with great news: our constituents are arriving soon! Please remain on your best behaviour. We’ve made enough of a mess, let’s not start any more trouble.”

He glances at Dot.

“I repeat: the mothership is about to come home.”

**Author's Note:**

> :) 
> 
> anyway remember how Reginald is a fucking alien?????? because I didn’t forget
> 
> anyway i absolutely loved the handler as a villain, an absolute iconic bitch, but i kind of wish we had more of Carmichael:( i wanted to see five fucking eat him


End file.
